Michael Burke, rector at St. Mary’s Episcopal, gave me some good advice today. We were talking about navigating and making decisions when working on a completely new project. There’s no real design to work from.
“We’re basically working with a bunch of puzzle pieces. Get them all out on the table. Move them around. See how things work together. Discern your next step from there.”
Usually when I do a puzzle, I have the lid to look at. I can get a pretty good idea of where things go.
With this campus ministry at UAA, there’s not much of a lid. We’ve got pieces of what other schools have tried, what New Day is trying in Dallas and the Holy Spirit.
This is the nature of ministry in our country right now. Many things that worked in the past don’t work anymore. We should be trying new things. Problem is we don’t have lids for those puzzles. And if we’re not intentional, our new efforts end up looking a lot like our old puzzles.
So we move forward, embracing the tension and awkwardness of puzzle arranging, while trusting God to reveal a little more of the puzzle lid when the time is right.
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